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NEWS
- The winners of this year's socially distanced Academy Awards ceremony include Daniel Kaluuya, Youn Yuh Jung, and Chloé Zhao. Find our full list of winners and nominees here.
- The legendary layout artist Roy Naisbitt has died at 90. Best known for his intricate and interweaving visions, Naisbitt worked on films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Space Jam, Balto and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- An extension of This Long Century, Ecstatic Static is a database of films and information from a broad community of artists. The site is currently screening films like Simon Liu's Signal 8, and also has an extensive library featuring new notes on filmmaking by Jodie Mack, Helena Wittmann, and more.
- Anthology Film Archives has announced a new online festival, presented in partnership with production company VANDA. Entitled VANDA Duarte: Dissident Films by Latin American Women Directors, the festival comprises of one program a day and is available to stream free of charge until May 5.
- The official teaser for Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, featuring a reimagined 1950's New York City.
- The new US trailer for Abel Ferrara's Siberia shows a roughened Willem Dafoe wandering through sand and snow, presumably through the world of his dreams. The film is set for a US release on June 18.
- MUBI's trailer for the new series Independent Women: The Pioneering Cinema of Márta Mészáros, which includes restorations of Mészáros's films by the Hungarian Film Archive.
- The official trailer for Melvin Van Peebles's debut feature, The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968), recently restored by Janus Films. The film follows an African-American soldier stationed in Paris, where he enters a romantic relationship with a French woman.
- Kelly Reichardt's First Cow is coming soon to theatres in the UK and to MUBI on May 28. The film, about a friendship between two travelers on the run in the 1820's Northwest, gently probes the notion of the American Dream.
- In the latest addition to their series The Thinking Machine for De Filmkrant, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin investigate the 1953 film Angel Face by Otto Preminger.
- Another Screen has a new program entitled Silence/Laughter, on "the psychiatrisation of female killers." Featuring two films by Marleen Gorris and Anita W. Addison, the program challenges notions of repression and mania and includes a collection of interviews and essays to accompany the films.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Paul Schrader by Franck Ferville.
- In Richard Brody's profile of Paul Schrader, Schrader shares his thoughts on the changing landscape of making and watching films, as well as his plans for a streaming series on the history of Christianity.
- Alex Dudok de Wit's forthcoming book on Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies, which draws on untranslated accounts by the film's crew and details its troubled production and contested meanings, is the first book-length study of the landmark animation film.
- In an interview with Vanity Fair, Barry Jenkins discusses his adaptation of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, the white gaze, and the influence of painter Kerry James Marshall.
- For The Baffler, A.S. Hamrah briskly reviews a batch of Oscar-nominated titles, from Minari (a "miracle of a film") to The Trial of the Chicago 7 ("the worst film of the twenty-first century so far").
Above: Yun-Jung Youn by Peter Ash Lee for the New York Times.
- From earlier this month, a New York Times profile on the storied life of actress Yuh-Jung Youn, the first Korean actress to win an Oscar for her performance in Lee Isaac Chung's Minari.
- Cassie Da Costa interviews five Black indie filmmakers (Jeanetta Rich, Shatara Michelle Ford, Ephraim Asili, Tayler Montague, and Merawi Gerima) who have been working on and releasing films in the past year, not letting the pandemic stop their creative process.
- Critic Isabel Slone has written a moving essay on the short career of Vikki Dougan, the model-turned-actor once known as "The Back," and her current whereabouts.
- Steve Macfarlane interviews the prolific Indian documentarian Anand Patwardhan, whose films are now streaming in a full retrospective on OVID, for Hyperallergic.
- The Serge Daney blog has published a new revised translation of Daney's essay on Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish from 1984.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- To celebrate his 75th birthday, John Waters has released Prayer to Pasolini, an audio set dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini. Recorded at a Rome memorial at the site of Pasolini's murder, it includes Waters speaking in tongues and several audio clips of Waters discussing Pasolini's films, being gay, and "eating shit."
- Godzilla: The Showa Era Soundtracks, 1954-1975 is now available to pre-order fromWaxwork Records for $450. Presented in collaboration with Toho, the box set is the first collection of all fifteen Godzilla film soundtracks from the Showa era.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- For Movie Poster of the Week, Adrian Curry takes a look at how Alfred Hitchcock became the star of his own posters.
- Gabrielle Marceau captures the irony of Takashi Miike's grisly comedy Audition in One Shot.
- In an interview with Peter Kim George, Lê Bảo discusses the meeting of autobiography and style in his film Taste.
- Kelley Dong explores the implications behind the belated release of Zack Snyder's Justice League as a tale of artistic compromise and corporate control.